The original Guild Wars and its expansions?

So I've got a few questions for anyone out there playing the original Guild Wars online. I was thinking of grabbing the platinum edition for $20. If you can help me out, I'd appreciate it.

1) On their website they say there's no monthly subscription fees after you buy the game. I like this a lot, but what I want to know is, will I have access to ALL content within the game without having to make further purchases for extra gear and such?

2) Is the player base large?

3) If it is possibly to make further purchases for the game after buying the platinum edition, do those purchases make your stronger? In other words, is Guild Wars a "pay to win" game?

4) What do you like most about Guild Wars?

5) What do you like least about it?

I'm interested in Guild Wars because I have all the soundtracks and they're some of the best I've ever heard for fantasy video games.

I know that's a lot of questions, but I don't want to waste any money.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

i havent played it in a long time so im sure things have changed.

the one thing i will say is that if you are buying it thinking its a WOW with no subscription then you will be dissapointed. this is not to say the game is bad (i loved it and played for many many hours)...its just not WOW. its nothing like that kind of game at all.

there is little grinding (well they did introduce a grind for titles but thats pretty much optional last i checked), you can acquire 100s of skills but you can only ever bring 8 with you when questing, your character can be completely reconfigured in any outpost whenever you want and all the adventuring is done in instances of areas. so once you are out of an outpost its just you and your party vs all the monsters in the area.

Thanks for the reply! :)

Once you buy the three campaigns and the expansion, you'll have access to just about all of the content in the game - minus some bonus mission packs that really only add a couple of hours to the pot. You could easily spend 1000 hours on the campaigns + expansion.

The game definitely isn't pay to win, since there's nothing really to buy with real money...and better equipment only gives you a small edge. The combat mainly relies on skill customisation and team management (in pve you'll be commanding a group of up to eight characters, although you only directly control 'your' character), none of which are influenced much by what you can buy.

The player base would be pretty small nowadays. That's not necessarily a problem, since areas are instanced and designed around small groups. Plus you will have access to a lot of AI buddies in place of other players.

As for what I like about Guild Wars...the skill system is excellent, and has a deck-building feel to it. The music and settings and whatnot are great, the gameplay and mission design is legitimately challenging at times, and it works as well as a singleplayer game as it does in groups.

As for the downsides...you won't be getting the higher achievements without dropping hundreds (or thousands) of hours into the game, and it's not as 'dynamic' or 'action heavy' as newer MMOs (which is both good and bad).

Thank you for the comments. What about the stories in the game and expansions? Are they good? Do they have cinematics or is there a lot of text based reading for the progression of plot and character development?

Guild Wars has story missions which are instanced, fairly long missions with accompanying cutscenes. There are lots of sidequests which have text-based deliveries, but the main campaigns are all done with in-game cutscenes.

one of the cool things they added in the third campaign was heroes, which are AI buddies that you outfit with weapons and skills, tailoring them to your own needs/tastes. Very late on they even added the ability to conscript your other characters as heroes, calling them "mercenary heroes," which is pretty cool.

By far what I appreciated about GW was the depth of the skills and how many different ways you can play a single character. So, take my Ranger...sometimes I would play as a beastmaster, wielding a staff, choosing a dire evolution pet (you can grow pets to three different stat lines - damage, health or balanced) and focusing on pet attack skills. I might go traditional archer, where I liked to use a kindle-conjure build, with conjure flame from the elementalist profession and trip and dual shots for my primary damage source. Or, for fun, I might run dual daggers with a spider pet and poison-based assassin combos. There's just so many ways to play.

The second best thing was the complexity of the enemies and their scripting. Each area feels like it has a specific character. Most online RPGs, enemies just look different and the devs don't even bother to worry about strengths, weaknesses or any kind of variance, getting lazy to the point where you can apply bleeds even to boxes (rift?). In GW you really have to think about what kind of enemies you're going to fight before you decide on your build going in. Thankfully the devs added a template system which allows you to save builds and trade with other players, easily subbing them in and out with a drop down menu while in an outpost. But, for example, if you're in Kryta, you're dealing with undead, so conditions, minion mastery, all that kinds of stuff is useless because skeletons don't bleed and you can't make flesh golems out of bones. If you're going up against Mursaat as a tank, you better thing about damage mitigation for defense, because damage avoidance skills, usually stances, don't work very well against mursaat front line fighters. I can't describe how many modern ORPGs and MMOs fail at creating this kind of complexity and it's a shame.

Anyway, loved GW...put ridiculous amounts of time into it...something like 4800 hours over five or six years if i remember right.

Dude, I think you just sold me on it! Just going to make sure there's no region locking (because I'm currently residing in Ecuador 'bleh!') and if there's no, then I'm going to get the game and play. Hopefully I can get my friends to game with me, but since the player base is somewhat low these days, we want to make sure we have enough players for a decent party.

Thanks for the response!

Guild Wars is sort of a PVP machine with Diablo style lobby PVE elements.

1. As long as you have the expansions you can access nearly all the content, there are a few side chapters that are not included in the expansions but those dont provide you with any advantage, just a bit more story.

2. No.

3. Guild Wars is not a pay to win game. As a matter of fact, you can hit the power ceiling pretty fast. With the only real upgrades after that being a more diverse deck.

4. I like the combat a lot. The classes are great too and allows for a lot of roles that go outside the typical tank/healer/damage dealer. There are mesmers who can royally mess up the opposition, warriors who can halt your advancement preventing melees from reaching the mesmers with ease. Rangers who can interrupt your party members, ruining their potentially table turning spells, the classes really add a lot of depth to the combat. A well coordinated enemy team is a lot like a puzzle for your party to solve. What are this enemy party's team composition and how do we break them using our skills?

5. The shortage of players nowadays is my main gripe. Followed by the poor pacing of the prophecies campaign.

What does the player base actually look like these days?

When I gave it a shot again, every player had moved over to the US servers (I am european).

How long ago was that?

A few months ago. I remember I wanted to play a good Guild Wars game again because the second one (Guild Wars 2) was absolute shit.

So the game being somewhat old-ish, what available resolutions does it support? I'm running 1366 x 768 resolution.